New dinner theater planned

Located in Mandarin, it will offer family friendly shows, the owner says.

The number of dinner theaters in Jacksonville is about to double. And the owners are planning to keep the new place clean, really clean.

Owner Bryce Perry said the Gathering Dinner Theatre, in the Mandarin Square shopping center just north of Loretto Road on San Jose Boulevard, will open on Feb. 6 with comedian Michael Joiner. They'll have a comedian the first Friday of each month.

The first theatrical show, The Fantasticks, which ran for 42 years off Broadway in New York, will open on Feb. 12. Other planned productions, Perry said, are Nunsense, Seven Brides for Seven Brothers and High School Musical. Each will run Thursday-Sunday for seven weeks, with a week and a half off between shows.

Bryce and Tammy Perry came down to Jacksonville from their native Canada about two years ago to minister at a church called The Gathering, which Bryce Perry said is not really active right now.

In Canada, he said, they'd been ministers and had a national TV show, Transforming Your Life with Tammy and Bryce. They haven't run a dinner theater before but did manage a restaurant and a resort. Tammy Perry had been a dancer with the Royal Winnipeg Ballet, her husband said.

The theater won't have any religious elements, but it will be family friendly with "high morals and high values," he said.

There will be no swearing in any of plays or comedy, he said, nor any sexual innuendo. The 200-seat theater will feature a dinner buffet, but no alcohol will be served.

Jacksonville is also home to the Alhambra Dinner Theatre which, at 41 years, is one of the nation's oldest.

Tod Booth, who has owned the Alhambra since 1984, wasn't sure about a second dinner theater opening.

"I don't think there's enough room for one," he said.

"It's a tough business," Booth said. "You've got to run a theater, run a restaurant and run a bar."

Like many in the entertainment business, Booth has seen a revenue drop with the struggling economy. He said his business is off 15 percent this year.

Alhambra only uses actors who are members of Actors' Equity union. In the late '60s and early '70s, Booth said, there were 174 union dinner theaters in the country. Now, he said, there are about 10.

The Gathering Dinner Theatre will not be union. Perry said he will pay the lead actors, but the supporting cast will get little if anything. "It's more for the experience," he said.

The prices will be similar to the Alhambra's: $45 for adults and $30 for children.

Mick Bollinger, president of National Dinner Theater Association and manager of Candlelight Pavilion Dinner Theatre in Claremont, Calif., said he didn't know how many dinner theaters there were in the country. But he did say that it was unusual to start a new one in the current economic situation.

But Perry said he wasn't worried.

"I'm believing that people want to get away from reality," he said. "We're starting on a small budget, and the response to what we're doing so far has been great.

"We've done the research. There's been a revival in theater. Since High School Musical, kids are dragging Mom and Dad out now."

So Perry says that there will be "no swearing in any of plays or comedy ... nor any sexual innuendo," yet he's announcing a production of "Nunsense," which contains a good bit of both. Does he plan to cut the (mild) profanity and (frequent) sexual innuendo from that script? Does he know that doing so without explicit written permission from the author is illegal under federal copyright law, and that many playwrights are unwilling to permit such cuts? Whatever the answers are here, it sounds like someone is going into this business a little naively.

As for the Alhambra Dinner Theater, I was surprised to read that it "only uses actors who are members of Actors' Equity union," because that is patently untrue. Virtually any time you see a show at the Alhambra, you will see some of the cast members marked in the program as being Equity members while others are not.

I'm all for the expansion of theater in Jacksonville, but I have to wonder with Booth whether the city has the audience to support two dinner theaters. On the other hand, Jacksonville residents often exhibit a remarkable unwillingness to leave their own neighborhoods for anything other than the First Baptist Church or a Jaguars game, which is why we have a Wal-Mart and a McDonald's on practically every corner, so maybe folks in Mandarin who think the Alhambra is "too far away" to patronize will "eat up" a new dinner theater located in their own back yards.